Of green stuff woven: Confessions of a conservationist cleric

In a braided narrative, Of Green Stuff Woven follows Brigid Brenchley, the woman dean of an Episcopal cathedral as she faces the decision ofdecides whether or not to sell the church’s restored urban prairie to hotel developers. The protagonist’s spirituality is intimately tied to the creation, symbolized by the prairie. As the story unfolds, she witnesses the suffering caused by a flood event in their her city, and she becomes convinced that humans are agents in such climate crises. On the other hand, the cathedral building and its bank accounts are in shambles and the hotel money is a possible solution. The main character and the significance of her dilemma are is enriched by memoir-like chapters that weave across the novel’s main plot, revealing how the land and the grasses came to take on such meaning for this 21st-century cleric. The fragility of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem and the fragility of liberal Christianity are together probed in a this novel, that is nonetheless comic which concludes that, though. Though threatened, both prairie and a prayer life are portrayed as ultimately resilient

Pilgrimage, Spatial Interaction, and Memory at Three Marian Sites

Global mediation, communication, and technology facilitate pilgrimage places with porous boundaries, and the dynamics of porousness are complex and varied. Three Marian, Catholic pilgrimage places demonstrate the potential for variation in porous boundaries: Chartres cathedral; the Marian apparition location of Medjugorje; and the House of the Virgin Mary near Ephesus. These three places are porous in that they emplace the interactions of different groups, fostering the permeability of boundaries between categories of pilgrimage and tourism, commercial place and devotional place, and cultural and spiritual value. They also show varied degrees of spatial porousness, either topographically or in their connection to surrounding areas of cultural heritage. Porousness is interdependent with contestation as proliferating audiences - including stakeholders, caretakers, marketers, and devotional and cultural participants - invite an array of interactions. Principal sources of contestation are multiple memory narratives (where people install or enact different memories about a place or image), heterogeneous audiences (where a wide demographic coincides and interfaces), and intermingled devotional and commercial places (where the pilgrimage marketplace does not merely overlap with devotional place, but merges with it). These sources of contestation combine in different forms at all three case studies, pushing their boundaries in physical and conceptual ways and calling into question how we define pilgrimage place

Turning Landscape Into Colour

Through the practice of painting this research questions how geologically distinct earth colours that are constantly forming from coal mine water treatment waste in geographically varied landscapes across the UK can be used to re-view perceptions of colour, material, and connection with the contemporary landscape. If historical connections between colour and landscape have been expressed through the names of colours such as burnt sienna and, in the context of the UK, Oxford ochre, how can finding, naming and using new sources of earth colour re-establish links between colour and landscape? Over the course of several journeys across the UK, visiting 34 Mine Water Treatment Sites run by the Coal Authority, five previously un-used and un-named earth colours from different sites are selected and used here for the first time. What sets these new ochres apart is the quality of their colour and their formation processes inside the flooding cavities of former coal mines, inadvertently providing a sustainable source of earth colour at a time of increasingly scarce mineral resources that paradoxically point towards the causes of industrial pollution. The practice of making individual artworks reveal optical and material distinctions between the new colours while suggesting unexpected idiosyncratic connections between individual colours and the unique landscapes they belong to, further contributing to the discourse on contemporary landscape. This practice-led fine art research has inspired plans for the commercial production of a new paint made from these earth colours with AHRC collaborative partners Winsor & Newton. In addition, the informal partnership with the Coal Authority has laid foundations for a substantial collaboration that includes potentially naming and designating select Mine Water Treatment sites as new public artworks, with the possible formation of a pigment processing factory on one of these sites. These opportunities form the basis for further research

Earth, Wood, Stone: Central Minnesota Lives and Landmarks (Volume 1)

I started writing for the St. Cloud Times in 1980 and continued sending monthly features to the paper until 1994. My subjects dovetailed with my classes in preservation, architectural history, and popular culture. When I arrived in St. Cloud in 1978, I discovered that the city’s vintage architecture was in danger of demolition, including a key landmark, the 1902 Beaux-Art Carnegie Library. I helped organize a preservation group and later a Heritage Preservation Commission that were organized to protect other buildings from being lost. Teaching classes on preservation subjects, and writing about these topics made a strong career for me as a new faculty member. No one to my knowledge had set a goal at SCSU to cover the subjects I was researching at that time or later. Some subjects that a researcher might find useful in my two volumes are: 1. The role of people in our community who were willing to organize a preservation group to save what was left of St. Cloud’s architectural landmarks. 2. Identification of landmarks that must at all costs be saved, e.g., the Masonic Temple by Cass Gilbert in downtown St. Cloud. 3. Recognition of landmarks in Central Minnesota that might have been passed by because of their ordinary appearance. Landmarks included log buildings and vernacular houses. Individual subjects that are useful for research: Volume 1: Earth, Wood, Stone Central Minnesota History St. Cloud Founders Samuel Pandolfo, Inventor of the Pan auto Ethnic Groups Downtown St. Cloud Disasters Farms St. Cloud Houses Ghosts Churches Schools Landmarks William Morgan arrived at St. Cloud State as a faculty member in 1978 and retired in 2000 as professor emeritus.https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/amerstud_facpubs/1000/thumbnail.jp

For Whom Was Built This Special Shell?’ Exploring the adaptive use of religious buildings as museums, galleries and cultural centres

Religious buildings have, for centuries, occupied a crucial position at the heart of our civic centres; anchoring communities through an emphasis on ritual, tradition and continuity. In recent years as urban neighbourhood perimeters shift in response to waves of immigration, and the cohesive congregations that supported them disperse, many buildings face abandonment or closure. In the last twenty‐five years a number of houses of worship have been adapted into museums and venues for cultural exchange, aiming to honour and interpret the religious history of the building while promoting dialogue with a diverse local community. This thesis explores the trend for adapting and converting houses of worship into museums and cultural centres. It assesses three unique sites as case studies: a former synagogue in London’s East End, a functioning synagogue on the Lower East Side of New York, and a former Methodist church in Cape Town, South Africa, as well as emerging sites located in active Anglican churches in London and the south east. My thesis postulates that former sacred places can be re‐animated by an arts group responding to the building’s spiritual legacy; utilising it to demonstrate a powerful link between the existing community and its early congregants. I argue that multiuse buildings which promote secular cultural programming while continuing to house a congregation may appeal to members of the public who do not necessarily identify with mainstream museum culture. This presents the field of museum studies with a new model for the ‘participatory’ museum: a landmark building which can respond to the distinct needs of a multi‐faith, ‘multicentred’ society. The analysis my thesis provides locates my work within at the intersection of theory and practice, and within broader developments in the disciplines of cultural, urban and museum studies, providing a socio‐historical perspective on a new kind of museum. It is intended to be used as a modus operandi for adaptive use by religious buildings

The Advocate - Feb. 25, 1960

Original title (1951-1987)--The Advocate: official publication of the Archdiocese of Newark (N.J.)

Religion and Art in Cross-Cultural Communication

Язык осн. текста - англ

Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, as the city modernized, efforts to preserve the past were caught between a desire for historical accuracy and the priorities of pleasure in the popular marketplace. As consumerism advanced, by the late nineteenth century, neither Rome nor London signaled a particular privileged moment in time (i.e. Roman antiquity). Instead, Britain’s historical consumers began to engage historical moments like goods available for picking and choosing. This study demonstrates a transition to subjectivity in historical tourism as a creative coping response to the professionalization of Victorian history writing. As they accessed history in an increasingly personal way, British consumers altered their relation to historical time. This project bridges cultural and intellectual histories, drawing attention to the intersections between academic and consumer practices and an increasingly fraught balance between pleasure and instruction. When Britain’s historical consumers grappled with shifts in historiography, they faced an epistemological crisis. Ultimately, they turned to personally gratifying, idiosyncratic visions of the past. By bringing scholarly history writing, historical tourism, and the wider literary market into a common analytical frame, this dissertation demonstrates that Victorian historical thought did not march, unimpeded, towards objectivity and professionalization. Instead, there was an interdependence between professional historical scholarship and consumer culture

Vibratory Lines; Experiments in Expressivity

All matter is expressive. All matter, animate or inanimate, sentient or made, is filled with the infinite potential for difference and articulation. All things, all bodies, are equal. In this context of absolute horizontality, expression is the innate desire for difference and qualitative distinction between things. It is the desire to shape matter and expresses the identity of a body: what it can do, how it can affect and how it is affected. An Expressionist, as defined by the research of the thesis, is one that extends expressive desire by intentionally shaping their surroundings. As architects, this intentional propagation of difference is second nature. We draw lines in space and create expressive territories. A composer might draw this immaterial line through song, but architecture draws these fine lines through space and condenses them into matter. Into brick-lines, or border-lines or atmospheric-lines. These lines are tools that sever and re-construct space, they oscillate between self-definition and the definition of their surroundings. They are vibratory in the nature. In this thesis, the Vibratory line and how it engages in expressionism becomes the basis for a set of experiments in writing, painting, modelling, curation and full-scale Installation. All works comprised in the thesis engage in an extended territorial refrain of this line